Databases storing large amounts of data (e.g., a terabyte of data) are difficult to navigate. Some prior art database navigation techniques and data filtering techniques require large amounts of data to be downloaded. For databases in which the data is organized in a hierarchy, a visual representation of the hierarchy populated by a web service is desired to simplify the navigation and reduce the amount of data downloaded during filtering.
In some prior art user interfaces, such as those written using a hypertext markup language (HTML) through which members of a hierarchy need to be selected, the user interfaces load all of the data in the hierarchy prior to display of the hierarchy. For hierarchies with large data sets, the display of the hierarchy appears slow and unresponsive to a user. Further, in some prior art systems, users are generally limited to selecting one node out of the hierarchy or one value out of series of correlated list boxes. These prior art systems do not allow users to select multiple nodes at any level in the hierarchy. In addition, some prior art user interfaces displaying the hierarchy lack the ability to visually represent at a parent level that a node beneath the parent level is selected.
For these reasons, a system for iteratively navigating a data hierarchy via a web service is desired to address one or more of these and other disadvantages.